The Third Man is still first class, 75 years on

“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror murder and bloodshed; but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

It’s one of the greatest pieces of dialogue in film history, even if, like lines attributed to Sherlock Holmes and Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca) it is usually slightly misquoted or mangled altogether.

It doesn’t even matter that, in terms of historical accuracy, the lines “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” — another wonderful, and accurate, quote from Casablanca — because they are delivered with such great aplomb by Orson Welles, and in a perfect cinematic shot (although it’s one of the few key scenes in the film to be shot in a studio rather than on location).

The film was The Third Man, which had its press preview 75 years ago this week. Although it was directed by Carol Reed (also responsible for Odd Man Out a couple of years earlier, as well as the wonderful musical Olivier!) it was thought for years that Welles was the de facto director. This is probably not true, although I agree with Peter Bogdanovich’s assessment that, “the look of The Third Man and, in fact, the whole film, would be unthinkable without Citizen Kane, The Stranger and The Lady From Shanghai,” all made by Welles in the 1940s and before The Third Man.

Hugh Cornwell - ‘I like to be unpredictable’. The former Stranglers leader talks Irish dates, his new live record and why a good album title is so important

Cult Movies: Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters doc offers a long-overdue retrospective on legendary British horror movie merchants

Where Welles did have input, though, was in the cuckoo clock speech. The idea wasn’t new to him and seems to have its origins in a comment from the artist James Whistler (acknowledged by Welles as “the fella”) that: “The Swiss in their mountains... are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box. For this was William Tell a hero.” Again, it doesn’t matter, because Welles’s tinkering around with and improvising dialogue — required to lengthen the scene — produced the lines that are remembered.

Graham Greene — with Brighton Rock and The Quiet American among his other novels — wrote the screenplay for the film. Because it was published as a standalone book after the film was released in 1949 it has been assumed that a novel came first. But it didn’t. Greene had been asked to write the screenplay about a man investigating his friend’s supposedly suspicious death in post-war Vienna and wrote it as a novelette (not a film script as such and never intended for publication): “The Third Man was never written to be read. But to me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story.” One recent reviewer noted: “It is a bit of a curiosity — a non-screenplay — but it works as a novel, with the short length making Greene pack lots of detail onto every page.”

It was Alexander Korda, one of the most influential producers/directors in British cinema, who asked Greene to go to Vienna to begin research for an original screenplay. Korda had money stuck in Vienna since before the war and decided that spending it shooting a film on location would be easier — and probably safer — than trying to release it through the usual banking routes. Greene knew the Austrian capital quite well from before the Second World War and spent a few weeks scouting locations and talking to people — including spies — before writing the novella that would become the screenplay.

The film probably wouldn’t have worked as well at any other location. Vienna was still showing signs of the war and Greene, Korda and Reed were all worried that the debris and rubble might be cleared away before filming began. The ongoing post-war divisions between the four powers meant that different nationalities were still coming and going. Welles’s Harry Lime, like many others, was able to move unnoticed through the occupied zones’ borders by way of the sewers, making considerable sums of money from the black market generally and the penicillin black market in particular.

Inspired, too, was Reed’s filming technique, sometimes referred to as ‘Dutch angles’, where the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame, which produces a viewpoint a bit like tilting your head to the side. The director Willam Wyler posted Reed a spirit level with a note: “Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?”

The scenes involving Lime — and Welles is only in the film for a few minutes — were shot either on location (with doubles used for Welles, who refused to go into the sewers) or at Shepperton studios in England, which is where he delivered the cuckoo ‘moment’. Years later Greene said he had based Lime on Kim Philby, who was his superior at MI6. But in 1955 Philby denied he was the ‘third man’ whose tip-offs had prompted Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to flit to Moscow in 1951.

The casting was inspired, particularly Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt; with incredibly good support from British stalwarts like Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White. Inspired, too, was Reed’s filming technique, sometimes referred to as ‘Dutch angles’, where the horizon line of the shot is not parallel with the bottom of the frame, which produces a viewpoint a bit like tilting your head to the side. The director Willam Wyler (The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday), a close friend of Reed, posted him a spirit level with a note: “Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?” Guy Hamilton, who later directed four Bond films, was assistant director.

The film is also remembered for Anton Karas’s zither music. Karas was unknown at the time and only came to fame after Reed heard him playing in a wine garden in Vienna and asked him to come to London and work on the score for the film. The Harry Lime Theme was an enormous international hit, and he later opened a Third Man bar in Vienna. The first few bars of the film are engraved on his grave marker. And for those of you who love the film, a Third Man Museum was opened in 2005 and there is also a Harry Lime tour of the sewers (described by one tourist as The Turd Man experience).

After three-quarters of a century the film remains a classic. As journalist Harry Mount puts it: “For a film that is so literally dated — rooted in the very particular, short-lived spell of Allied-occupied Austria from 1945 to 1955 — it is strangely timeless; modern, even.” It continues to top film lists across the world. The theme tune remains instantly recognisable. And Welles’s snatch of dialogue will continue to be misquoted and mangled.